Let the drums roll, there is reason to rejoice. Tink is back with her insightful interviews with the People of KDE. Tink has updated the set of questions, and notes that she has prepared an impressive list of future interviews. The launch of the new interview season features Kalle (yes, the one and only Matthias "Kalle" Dalheimer). Thanks to Tink for her great work. We hope you enjoy the new series.

Damn you KDE, for you are turning me into a GUI user.
I swear to god, I used to despise gui's.
(That may not be entirely true, probably only the windows gui)
But anyway, all these nifty features make me so lazy, and they "deconsole" me.
I just want to say you are the best of the best.
(Gnome developers also, no, better anyone coding for linux).
So thank you so much for spending your time working very hard on KDE.
If I ever win the lotto, first thing I'll do is donate something to KDE :)

> ~ What is missing badly in KDE?
> A Publisher-like program that makes it very easy to create all kinds of stationery, labels, etc.

I thought that KWord is both Word and Publisher-like. Of course all the functionnalities are not still here, but it seems very well started...

> ~ Which section of KDE is underrated and could get more publicity?
> KOffice, especially KSpread.

In Koffice, I think that KSpread is in late (for instance comparing with Kword or KPresenter). So I don't feel false that it is "underrated". But with a good KChart (thanks !) and a good keyboard navigation in words, it will change, of course...

M$ Publisher may be called a document publishing system, but in my experience, it's always being used for it's built-in greeting cards, calendars, small posters, and other such stuff. Those who want a real publishing system for things like newsletters tend to gravitate towards other, more expensive commercial software, or just use M$ Word. KWord is a nice word-processor, but it can't do greeting cards yet. :-)

> M$ Publisher may be called a document publishing system, but in my experience, it's always being used for it's built-in greeting cards, calendars, small posters, and other such stuff. Those who want a real publishing system for things like newsletters tend to gravitate towards other, more expensive commercial software,

Hmmm, I disagree. I see my own experience (and some others I know)... I used at first Pagemaker and then Publisher (because it was less expensive and did most things I needed). Publisher is called Publisher because it is a small, honest, well done document publishing system. You are wrong when you say "it's always being used for it's built-in greeting cards, calendar". Also, it is used as a web editor, but, here, it is bad...

I think that KWord, in future versions, is able to do what Publisher does (as document publishing...) but I don't think it can one day do what Pagemaker does (and I don't think it is necessary and useful).

Today, the big lack of KWord as a document publishing system is that it does'nt have a desktop (or table) around the sheet (for moving some texts, images...). And also it lacks hyphenation. And also there is no "forced justification" ("justification forcée" in french) (available in Pagemaker, not in Publisher).

About "built-in greeting cards, calendar", yes, it is not in KWord now, but I think it will be able to do this in future versions, it is better that using another program, no ?

You're probably right. My experience with Publisher is limited to school-curriculm computing. They bought about 30 Publisher licenses at about $40 each or so w/ school discount, then proceeded to use it entirely for greeting cards and little one page "newsletters" based on templates, and they had apparently had someone come in and rip up the UI's defaults a bit to make it look specialized for that sort of thing. It doesn't surprise me they were missing the point of the program, now that I think about it.

Hmm... I have great respect for people who have taken the time to learn other languages, but how many of them does Kalle know anyhow? If he can read a menu and understand it in all of Europe, that's got to be a lot! I, at least, would be completely lost with a Hungarian menu, for instance. Even if I consider myself moderately civilized with six languages.